When the subject of Napa Valley wines comes up, cabernet sauvignon comes in first place on the chatter meter followed by more cabernet sauvignon before the talk turns to white varietals – usually chardonnay. But there’s an undervalued player on the white-varietal front in Napa totally deserving of your attention: sauvignon blanc.
It’s a wine that sometimes get a bad rap, with thoughts of tinned tropical fruit and wilting flowers coming to mind. However, a well-executed sauv blanc is a wonderful thing – aromatic, fresh and vibrant. Basically, a summer drinking companion destined to please any and all. James and I were recently in Napa Valley and found ourselves drinking sauvignon blanc almost every day and feeling like we should let everyone else in on the fun.
Sauvignon blanc has been planted in Napa for over a century now, with the first cutting supposedly coming straight from Chateau d’Yquem in Bordeaux in the 19th century. However, it was Robert Mondavi’s bottlings of sauvignon blanc in the late 1960s and 1970s that first caught the attention of wine lovers, at a time when admirers of the variety were few and far between. His wines were modeled after those from Pouilly Fume from the Loire Valley, meaning drier and more complex, and he called them “fume blanc.”
